No ring of the doorbell, just a text. No tip for the driver? No problem in this test, where Domino's and Ford are teaming up to see if customers will warm to the idea of pizza delivered by driverless cars.

Starting Wednesday, some pizzas in Domino's hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., will arrive in a Ford Fusion outfitted with radars and a camera that's used for autonomous testing, per the AP. A Ford engineer will be at the wheel, but

the front windows have been blacked out so customers won't interact with the driver. Instead, people will have to come out of their homes and type a four-digit code into a keypad mounted on the car. That opens the rear window and lets them retrieve their order from a heated compartment.

The experiment will help Domino's understand how customers will interact with a self-driving car, says company President Russell Weiner. Among the questions:

Will they want the car in their driveway or by the curb? Will they understand how to use the keypad? Will they come outside if it's raining or snowing? Will they put their pizza boxes on top of the car and threaten to mess up its expensive cameras? Weiner said the company has 100,000 drivers in the US. In a driverless world, he said, he could see those employees taking on different roles within the company.

Qualcomm introduced its first-announced Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) commercial solution based on 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 14 specifications for PC5-based direct communications, the Qualcomm C-V2X Reference Design, which will feature the 9150 C-V2X chipset with integrated GNSS capability, and include an application processor running the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) V2X stack and a Hardware Security Module (HSM). Qualcomm is working with PSA, Ford, Audi and SAIC using the specification.

Qualcomm joinsed AT&T, IBM, Nokia, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Trustonic as part of the IoT Cybersecurity Alliance formed earlier this year.

Qualcomm and Himax Technologies, jointly announced a collaboration to accelerate the development and commercialization of a high resolution, low power active 3D depth sensing camera system to enable computer vision capabilities for use cases such as biometric face authentication, 3D reconstruction, and scene perception for mobile, IoT, surveillance, automotive and AR/VR.

By 2020, the storage requirements of the connected vehicle could reach 1 terabyte. Memory system bandwidths of 300 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and beyond will be required to power full autonomous driving. As the memory and storage market leader in automotive, Micron is uniquely positioned to help accelerate the industry’s pace of innovation.

Fastest LPDDR4 shipping to auto manufacturers - Micron is already deploying automotive-grade low-power DDR (LPDDR) memories to multiple automotive customers. The company announced today that it has commenced shipping LPDDR4x, running at 4266 megatransfers per second (MT/s) – the highest speed grade permitted by the LPDDR4 specification - to key chipset partners. This technology can enable overall system bandwidths of up to 100GB/s and provides a foundation for the next-generation of autonomous vehicle design.

High-performance memories for automotive - Today, Micron is also announcing its commitment to deliver high-bandwidth GDDR6 memory solutions for the automotive market. Graphics memory (GDDR) is a high-performing memory commonly found today in gaming, graphics and virtual reality applications. Micron plans to leverage its strength in graphics memory to provide the highest bandwidth solutions designed to meet stringent auto qualifications. The company is actively engaged with leading automotive partners and customers to enable GDDR technologies that will meet the needs of level 4/5 – full autonomy – and beyond.

Autonomous driving, AI and machine learning are rapidly converging in tomorrow’s vehicles, which will become the ultimate Internet of Things and edge computing devices. While cloud connectivity in modern vehicles creates new service opportunities, it also creates security management challenges and vulnerability concerns.

Introducing secure boot: Micron is extending the value of its hardware-based Authenta™ security solution by showcasing the capability to secure boot a system based completely on Authenta-enabled memory. The technology will provide a unique level of protection for the lowest layers of device software in automotive ECUs, starting with a secure boot process.

New development kits for Authenta™ security solutions: At MWC, the company announced that it plans to make Authenta™ software and hardware development kits available to general automotive and IoT customers by the end of the year. This will enable customers to begin evaluating how to integrate Authenta-enabled flash in their security architecture, to implement capabilities like secure boot, cloud-based attestation, authentication and provisioning. This will allow customers to increase the defense in depth of their solutions, all without adding additional hardware components into their design.

Media panel with industry leadersDuring a press panel on the eve of MWC Americas, Micron and key industry partners discussed the technologies and solutions that will become increasingly critical enablers for the next wave of intelligent vehicles in the automotive sector. Watch the replay here: youtube.com

Jeff Bader, VP of Embedded Business Unit, Micron:“The automotive segment presents a unique set of requirements that depend on innovation from Micron. High-performance memories such as Micron’s GDDR will help accelerate the overall system capabilities of connected vehicles by providing the raw performance that will initially be needed to achieve full autonomy. With the addition of GDDR to our portfolio, Micron is extending our leadership position and continuing to fuel innovation in the automotive industry.”

Krish Inbarajan, Global Head of Connected Car, Cisco Jasper:“At the center of connected car innovation today is the need to consistently enhance the driver’s experience by delivering valuable connected services. Auto makers need to be able to deliver compelling new services that drive recurring revenue, while also making the driving experience safer and more personalized. Cisco Jasper Control Center is the automated connectivity management platform trusted by more than 50 leading car brands to run connected car services reliably, securely, and at a lower cost - globally.”

Doug Seven, Head of Connected Vehicle Platform, Microsoft Azure:“Security lies at the heart of Microsoft’s Connected Vehicle Platform. Vehicles will increasingly make autonomous decisions that affect the safety of its passengers and other drivers and pedestrians, and manufacturers need to be confident in the integrity of these systems. Microsoft is one of only a few companies with a global cloud that has enterprise-security built in. Our commitment to compliance and regulation are the top reasons car manufacturers will rely on and trust Microsoft to help them build future connected vehicles.”

Tim Wong, Director of Technical Program Management for Autonomous Vehicles, NVIDIA:“Artificial intelligence for self-driving requires a fresh approach to allow vehicles to make sense of, and act on, huge volumes of data flowing into the vehicle in real time. We’re working with automakers and suppliers to meet this major industry shift to autonomous vehicles by enabling them to design cars using the most advanced processor and memory technologies.”

Sanjay Vishin, Director of Automotive Platforms, Qualcomm:“5G/Wireless connectivity to smart vehicles will be a game changer both for enabling vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. It will provide a bridge between the car, its surroundings and the cloud, especially as the car becomes more autonomous. This will enable more efficient machine learning (and hence services) in the Cloud and in the Car, along with more predictive and efficient collaborative control for autonomous cars.”

About MicronMicron Technology (MU) is a world leader in innovative memory solutions. Through our global brands – Micron, Crucial® and Ballistix® - our broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies, including DRAM, NAND, NOR Flash and 3D XPoint™ memory, is transforming how the world uses information. Backed by more than 35 years of technology leadership, Micron’s memory solutions enable the world’s most innovative computing, consumer, enterprise storage, data center, mobile, embedded, and automotive applications. Micron’s common stock is traded on the Nasdaq under the MU symbol. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc.(MU), visit micron.com.

Micron and the Micron orbit logo are trademarks of Micron Technology, Inc.(MU) All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

The panel includes people from Micron, NVDA, QCOM, and MSFT. The introduction to the panel discussion takes about 8 minutes, then two minutes or so introducing each panelist, then the real discussion begins at around 10 minutes or so.

Amid the constant barrage of autonomous driving news, and today’s major Tesla TSLA ruling, one highly popular semiconductor stock has seemingly cruised under the radar in terms of self-driving car coverage: Micron MU.

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found Tesla at least partially to blame for the first official car-related autopilot death. The NTSB announced that “operational limitations” in Tesla's Autopilot technology played a major role in a deadly May 2016 crash.

The committee concluded that it was too easy for a driver to push the limits of Tesla’s current hands-free driving technology and safety measures (also read: Tesla Stock Gains While Self-Driving Tech On Trial).

But Micron might be poised to help every major automaker create a secure self-driving vehicle future.

Micron’s Self-Driving Exposure

Micron markets its memory and data storage solutions to computer manufacturing firms, consumer electronics companies, and telecommunications powers. The semiconductor giant has also invested heavily in vehicle safety technology that could prove to be foundational for a driverless car future.

The company’s vehicle-focused semiconductor technology currently helps reduce human driving errors, which includes gesture control interfaces that help detect drowsy and distracted drivers. Micron technology combines multiple vehicle sensors to create more advanced computer “vision” in vehicles. The company’s artificial intelligence also helps cars detect objects and humans that might be in the road and alert the driver.

And a key factor in the long-term viability of self-driving car technology will the ability for vehicles to interact with one another. That is why Micron has also started to develop vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology.

On Tuesday, Micron executives partnered with Cisco CSCO, Microsoft MSFT, NVIDIA NVDA, and Qualcomm QCOM to talk about the future of autonomous driving. Micron estimates that by 2020, a single connected vehicle could require at least 1 terabyte of memory storage capacity.

The company is already shipping automotive-grade low-power DDR (LPDDR) memories to automotive clients. Micron contends that this technology can enable overall system bandwidths of up to 100 gigabytes per second. However, according to Micron, bandwidths of 300 GB/s will be needed in order to power fully autonomous vehicles down the road.

“Micron’s GDDR memory will provide the industry with the first automotive-grade solution that can meet the future performance needs of self-driving vehicles,” Micron VP of Embedded Business Unit Jeff Bader said during the panel.

Bottom Line

Today’s connected vehicles require vast amounts of memory to power all of their high-tech features. As the long march towards driverless cars continues, memory needs will only grow. The world of self-driving cars can’t start until safety measures improve exponentially, as Tesla Autopilot accidents help prove.

Micron is already working towards a future where every car on the road needs to automatically detect everything that is going on. And there can be no long load times when people are allowed to be asleep at the wheel.

Samsung Electronics Co. is upping its $8 billion bet on automotive technology, forming a separate business unit within Harman to house autonomous driving products and plowing $300 million into a new fund investing in startups in the space.

The autonomous driving unit will compete on everything from driving algorithms to systems integration, Dinesh Paliwal, Harman’s chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. That will include an advanced-driver assistance platform with open software that allows outside engineers to build products off of it -- a shot at Mobileye, which was acquired by Intel Corp. this year in a move that mirrored Samsung’s automotive leap.

“Our industry is literally screaming, saying, ‘We love Mobileye but we need an open platform,”’ Paliwal said. “Competition is the best thing ever. The auto industry wants us to do it and we think we have the capacity and the fuel power.”

The South Korean smartphone maker, which snapped up U.S.-based Harman International Industries Inc. last year for $8 billion to elbow its way into the hotly contested market for automotive tech, is betting it can marry its consumer electronics expertise with Harman’s presence in dashboards all over the world. If it works, it will be able to offer carmakers a lightning-quick connected system for infotainment, mapping, concierge services and autonomous driving -- without the competitive anxieties other tech giants like Apple Inc. or Alphabet Inc.’s Google tend to arouse.

Startup Fund

John Absmeier, vice president of smart machines for the Samsung Strategy & Innovation Center and former director of Delphi Automotive Plc’s autonomous vehicle project in Silicon Valley, will lead the new unit, which was announced Thursday at the Frankfurt motor show.

To further access to new tech, Samsung is also creating a fund to invest in an array of technologies needed to enable self-driving and connected cars, from sensors and machine vision to artificial intelligence and security. The fund’s first strategic investment will be in TTTech, a safety-controls developer for autonomous systems.

In a statement announcing the unit, Samsung was careful to note that it won’t enter the car-manufacturing business, positioning itself as non-threatening ally to automakers. Samsung in August received a California permit to test autonomous cars on public roads.

“If we were not acquired by Samsung, in five years’ time we would have been struggling,” Paliwal said. “This is all about scale going forward.”

Alphabet Inc. has held conversations with Lyft Inc. about a potential investment in recent weeks, signalling strong support for Uber Technologies Inc.’s main U.S. competitor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hortonworks, Cloudera Players in Future of Self-Driving Cars, Says Cowen Hortonworks, Cloudera and Teradata are among names that could benefit from an "explosion" of data in connected vehicles in coming years, say analysts with Cowen & Co. in a 242-page think-piece on autonomous vehicles.

Cowen & Co.’s analysts today published a mammoth, 242-page group report on the future of electric vehicles, one of whose takeaways is that there will be lots ofwork for software makers such as Hortonworks ( HDP) and Cloudera ( CLDR), purveyors of the open-source Hadoop data mining technology.

After that, however, artificial intelligence becomes the next goal, and the group see a field with lots of competing approaches and apparently no clear winner.

The authors, 19-strong, start with the premise that purchases of electric vehicles will be stronger in the next few years than the market currently expects, albeit still a fraction of annual auto sales:

We see an inflection of electric vehicle (EV) adoption in the 2025 to 2030 time frame as vehicles become economical on an unsubsidized basis. We see the start of the “hockey stick” in demand starting in 2018 though due to electric cars being more widely available, having a “cool” factor more broadly than just the Tesla does today, as well as economic ownership as EVs becoming cheaper than internal combustion engines (ICEs). We see global EV penetration hitting 1% in 2017 and rising to 3.1% in '20 and 7.5% in '25. Most other forecasts call for about 2.5% penetration in' 20 and 5% in '25; however, estimates have been creeping up. While we expect a sharp acceleration of growth in EVs in the coming years, we note that our '20 forecast still has 98% of vehicles sold using some form of an internal combustion engine, which includes hybrid solutions as well as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

Software analyst J. Derrick Wood offers his thoughts on A.I., with the premise that the “hundreds” of sensors and other chips in each vehicle will cause data “volumes to explode."

"This is already true,” writes Wood, "with Formula 1 cars which create 36TB of data per race, generated from >100 sensors that are distributed throughout the car, collecting data about the braking system, tire pressure, engine, calibration, temperature and much more.” He cites one research house, Datameer, stating that a self-driving car will generate 1 terabyte of data per hour.

Wood offers a forecast for the annual volume of data, which shows it reaching 1.5 million petabytes of data annually by 2020, as shown in the chart at the top of this post.

All that data grow will lead to car makers becoming “large consumers of data/analytics, and even applications software."

Among software that will gain popularity are Apache Spark and Apacke Kafka, two tools for “stream processing” to hand the flood of data coming from the sensors, writes Wood.

The next stage, he writes, is batch processing of all the data that is stored:

Already, notes Wood, four of the top five automakers are using Hortonworks’s software. He describes some of the capabilities:

The Hortonworks Data Flow (HDF) platform supports bi-directional data communication between an on-vehicle platform and the cloud (known as its data-in-motion platform). It communicates sensor and telematics control unit data in real-time such as speed, geo-location and airbag deployment. HDF has an intelligent agent that runs on embedded devices in the car, and it uses data filtering and prioritization to determine the most crucial data sets to communicate between the car and the cloud. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) manages the data-at-rest for storage, security, operations, analytics and machine learning.

The “key to bringing it all together,” writes Wood, is A.I. Wood then goes into a lengthy explanation of A.I. techniques, such as “machine learning.”

We have seen major technology initiatives from Uber, Lyft, Google, Ford, GM, BMW, Audi, Nissan, Volvo, Daimler, Renault, Toyota, Tesla, Navistar and many others. In fact, GM, Volvo, Nissan, Ford and Tesla all have plans to have achieved full autonomy into its vehicles at some point over the next several years, including Nissan in 2020 and Ford in 2021. Google created a new company, Waymo, for focusing on driverless vehicle technology.Wood notes that automakers have their own initiatives for A.I. and autonomous driving, and that […] Companies like Google (Tensorflow), Microsoft (CNTK) and AWS (DSSTNE) have open-sourced their Machine Learning IP and now ML algorithms are widely available to be used to build an AI platform. In turn, there are a plethora of start-ups building their own proprietary algorithms and services to evangelize the growing market opportunity. The automotive industry has widely embraced algorithms to analyze the vast amounts of data streaming from test vehicles, many of which are capturing 1000s of GB of data per hour from cameras and other sensors throughout the car.